


Dragon Mark

by sanerontheinside



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Body Paint, F/M, Imperial Years, NSFW, Post-Order 66, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slavery, but on the less angsty side, child endangerment, references to, war games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 00:15:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9937760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanerontheinside/pseuds/sanerontheinside
Summary: A Jedi Shadow and her Commander gradually grow closer over the years after Sixty-Six.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilyrose225](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyrose225/gifts).



> NSFW, prompted by lilyrose225: Sly/Liura, Intimacy. 
> 
> Hello, more original characters.

“Mind if I try something?” he’d asked her before. 

“Try what?” Ankles locked behind his back, nipping at his lips, Liura been mostly focused on teasing Sly senseless, but she’d leaned back as far as his grasp allowed and waited for him to recover his wits—and breath—enough to speak.  


His body followed her, drawn along by her lips and smile and the smoky heat of her, the curious flash of heavily-lidded violet eyes. Sly nuzzled under her ear, trailed light licks and fluttering kisses slowly to her shoulder, clamped his teeth down with insistent, gentle pressure on the tendon there to hear a soft and breathy moan. “Painting,” he’d whispered into her neck on soft, damp, interrupted breaths. “Body art— _oh—_ ”  


A quiet keening noise escaped his throat as muscles fluttered and shifted about his length, tight and hot velvet. Liura grinned wickedly, letting her hands run up from his shoulders and into his hair and leaned back against his knees, hips rolling slowly. With a groan he let his head fall forward, rested his forehead against her collarbone, panting and muttering half-hearted curses as he shuddered at the surfeit of sensation.  


_“Yes,”_ she’d whispered over his ear, with a smile he could not see. He couldn’t see much of anything just now but the flares of copper gold behind his eyes and streaks of violet unfolding into inky star-bespeckled night.  
  


  


* * *

  


Even when he brushed against her in the odd moments of the day, fingertips light over smooth dark skin, brushing her hair away from the nape of her neck, he sometimes caught flashes of something _other._ Something large and bottomless and light and dark and shifting, like starlight reflected on dragon scales.

He’d seen a Ithorian dragon once – she’d tugged him along through a cold desert night, laughter soft as the fine smoothed-dust sand against their bare feet. His breath caught in wonder at the sight of it, a sleek black-armoured predator resting nestled in the still-warm sands. Sly watched it, watched Lia as she softly padded up to it and drew incrementally closer, one predator to another. It was ill, the Ithorians had told her, and they’d asked for her help treating it. An endangered species, its place in the desert a cornerstone of the entire delicate system, threatened by some illness they had not yet seen.

“Did the Jedi often do this?” he had asked her, staring at the holoprojected dragon hours before and wondering how he’d ever have a chance to defend her if she agreed to help.

“On occasion,” Lia told him, “though not often. Only if the locals couldn’t figure out what went wrong.”

He’d seen _jetiise_ approach all manner of monsters, seen them—not tame—sooner form an agreement or a temporary bond—with wild beasts no other being dared to trifle with. At least on one memorable occasion, Liura had _persuaded_ a gundark to leave her squad the hells alone, but later upon inquiry, she’d laughed and told them: “Had that gundark had a nest of younglings to protect, I would have ordered you to run.”

 _Jetiise_ were not made for war. With every battle, every mission, every crisis, layers of ‘pristine’ and ‘civilised’ fell away. Sly had watched it happen with his first commanding officer, but when he met Liura she was already wild, and the Council’s uneasiness, their wary looks on her all seemed to say that she’d been like this long before the war began—far longer than they were comfortable with.

Layers didn’t so much fall away from her as they might quickly knit themselves together when the predator settled down to rest. She wrapped herself in stillness and warmth and steady quiet, hiding, but Sly could see the traces of it still. Saw the thin and twisting golden flashes along her skin out of the corner of his eye, the veined patterns that resembled lightning scars. Sly almost felt them on his own skin, hot and pulsing like healing wounds, though not exactly painful. He often wondered at that sensation, at what it must have meant for her.

But he would never ask, not like this, not when the _jetiise_ obviously thought it _rude_ to broadcast, and he did not want to risk her pulling further away into her layers. They rested deep and tight enough without her worry reinforcing them like a solid cage—and he’d seen that side of her as well, when one or more of their company was captured. He’d never admit to being afraid of his General (he never gave anyone the chance to ask, but— _yes, yes, sometimes he thought the Council was at least thinking in the right direction, she was dangerous and_ protective _and she_ burned _—_ )

When the Republic fell, when the Order was destroyed— _so many dead, so many screams, so much pain and fire—_ when the Empire rose from its ashes in less than an unholy hour—then, certainly, something loosened, cracked, and broke. For a long time he saw that golden glint not on her skin, but in her eyes. The heat ran over his body still, but not in patterns anymore. It felt feverish, rippled through him in prickling waves; it felt like energy reigned in and tightly leashed into obedience. Sly was all but vibrating in place. He hardly slept, felt like he could keep pushing on and on for hours, or even days without a wink of sleep.

When he’d finally cornered his exhausted General— _too late, it had taken him too long to realise she was wasting, that she was feeding him that angry energy unconsciously as she ran_ —when he’d challenged her to an unarmed spar and nearly gotten both of them killed, and that tense feeling washed away in a cold spike of fear. And then, when she’d checked and rechecked nearly twenty times that he was still whole, still breathing, still with her, she’d collapsed and tried, haltingly, to apologise.

Sly wasn’t sure what finally convinced her that he would never leave her side. All throughout the war, that had been something of a difficult point—that he’d been made for the _jetiise,_ made for _her._ Objectively, he’d sometimes permitted himself the bitter thought that he was nothing but a tool, a slave. His first _jetii_ had certainly driven home that point. But when he made the choice to stay with her, after Sixty Six, Sly hadn’t made it out of obligation. In a fit of thorny irritation, he’d joked that if it hadn’t been for him, she would have found a blasted smoking hole between her eyes already.

(In more frightening moments, a voice that he studiously ignored would whisper in his head that the reverse was far more true.)

She’d choked on her next argument, sputtered into silence. But in moments, slowly, he felt a warm and steady glow unspool within his chest, spreading outwards to his toes and fingertips.

Still afterwards, it took him an embarrassingly long time to realise that whatever layers she wove around her ever-burning, quiet rage, she’d automatically made room for him within them. The Ithorian Dragon, half-buried in the sun-warmed desert sands, protecting its smaller mate. Unmoving, guarding it while it wasted from its injury.

For all that he was made for her, to protect her, so often he felt warm and safe and coiled-around, and he was only now beginning to realise where that feeling came from.  
  


  


* * *

  


Fingers traced patterns in her dark smooth skin, brushing her hair away from her neck and shoulders. Liura shifted comfortably, stretching, and eased back, pillowing her head on crossed forearms. His breath hitched at that utter comfort and trust, given over to him like this: in bed beneath him, her back a canvas for him to work on. His eyes burned, his throat constricted, and he leaned over her, trailing kisses from between her shoulderblades up the vertebrae to her neck, sliding his fingers into her hair.

Lia purred, as she always did, and arched up into his touch.

“Shh,” Sly whispered, “lie still.”

She pressed against him again with a tiny noise of complaint, then settled down with pleased, quiet murmurs.

He ran his hands gently over her shoulders, down the line of her ribs and flanks, traced her spine to the small of her back with one finger, watching her tense as he let his touch dance over ticklish spots, but otherwise staying motionless. “Beautiful.”

He knew exactly the way to make her arch, tight as a bowcaster, to come up on her elbows. He had only to dig in his thumbs near her spine, at the small of her back or under her lowest ribs. She was horribly ticklish, that way. Not to light touches, those she didn’t mind. So the flow of the brush over her dark skin, the careful, shimmering lines of gold in a honeycomb pattern at the small of her back, was not that much a worry. Still, before he began, he couldn’t resist making this something of a challenge.

“Hold still,” he repeated, pressing his hips down, digging his thumbs in to see her struggle, to watch her tense and fight desperately to stay still, giggling and muffling a faint moan in the pillows. He let up the pressure, ran his hands up along her flanks, fingers trailing lightly up her ribs, into the warmth and softness of the sheets beneath her, under the curve of her breasts—and tellingly, that light touch got him a strangled whimper.

Sly bent low over her again, rocking gently, and whispered hotly in her ear: “I’m going to put the brushes and the paint on your back, you’ll have to stay very still. Can you do that?” he asked, then nipped teasingly at her ear, worrying it to distract her from an answer. “Well?” he rumbled. Knowing full well that his victim was a bit preoccupied, he trailed a path of hot breath down her neck and to her shoulder, biting down slowly while one hand stroked down to play over the hard ridge of her hip bone—the left, to his delight, far more sensitive and easily ticklish.

“Yes!” The answer came to him on a gasp, and he smiled, wicked.

“Very good, love, you’re doing very well.”

The jars of paint were small, hexagonal cold glass of excellent craftsmanship, no less than the paint inside. The colours he would use were all the colours he had seen in nebulae, complementary to the warm, copper-toned bronze of her skin. He wanted, oh how he wanted, a nebula across her back, from lowest left rib to high on her right shoulder. He wanted a pool of darkness in the small of her back, and in bold gold lines, a hexagonal pattern, diminishing into _small-scattering-precious_ hexagons, like a fractal, and out of it the nebula itself would start. He didn’t quite know what he wanted, save to savour the taste of her trust for him, laid out like this under his body.

Sly had never had cause to think himself a great artist. Laser, with his clever eye, had done that for his brothers, but Laser was gone, as was Raptor and Flare and—Sly deliberately cut himself off. There would be time for that, later, with the Remembrance he recited every night. For now there was only Lia. Lia, who had no marks on her skin, not even scars. He knew, the _jetiise_ had plenty of scars. That was curious.

She hummed contentedly under the cool brush strokes, never once asking him what he was doing. It would be long and delicate work, but, he’d realised, he’d always been far better with brushes on any sort of canvas than with needles on skin. That eased a great deal of his worry. And that sense of warmth, as well, that he’d come to associate only with Liura and her strange, strange, predatory, _resting-simmering-dragon_ ways.

“There are no marks on you,” he said eventually, the mystery too important, too strange for him to ignore.

“Hm?” She drew the sound out, eyes closed, basking in the feeling of the soft wet bristles running along her skin. “What marks?”

Sly wanted to shrug. “Marks, scars… The brothers chose their designs. It was another way of making us unique, identifiable. Some of the  _jetiise_ …”

She tensed under his hands and he stopped, rubbing his fingers gently at an unpainted ridge of spine, staring down at wide-open, unseeing eyes. “Lia?” he asked softly.

No answer came for a very long moment. She seemed, for all he knew, to be holding her breath. Sly certainly was, but he wasn’t Jedi-trained, he couldn’t quite hold out that long—

He began to move away, only for her to stop him: “Sly. It’s alright. It’s not—”

She would have shaken her head, he just knew it, but he had her pinned under the jars of paint. “I’m sorry,” he said, not entirely sure what he was apologising for. For bringing up bad memories, foremost, but he didn’t know what they were and that unnerved him suddenly.

“Don’t be, _cyar’ika,_ ” Liura whispered. “For you, for your brothers, it was a mark that declared you your own people. That the Republic, the _Jedi_ did not own you.” She sighed. “I… I grew up in a world where a scar meant ownership. You were a trophy or a prize, you went to the first one who marked you, and they did with you what they liked. I learned very early to wipe away all traces of those scars, but accelerated healing… It doesn’t do enough,” she finally admitted, quiet. “It removes the tissue damage, hides the injury, but the memory persists. It’s not so quick to fade away as even natural healing would let it.”

Sly stared. He stared at his hands, at the little jars of paint. At the gold he’d chosen for her skin, and the deeper, darker colours. He cleared his throat. “If you don’t want this –”

“Oh, I do,” she assured him fervently. “And if I could convince you to move the paint and let me up, I’d prove it to you. Please, Sly. Don’t stop.”

Reassured, slightly, he took in a deep breath. Then he went on.

Every now and then, to rest his hand, or move his body, he might shift, change position, ever conscious of the slightest tension, of how the drying paint must feel, cool trails slightly pulling at her skin. Sly hadn’t quite realised the scale of what he undertook. He paused at times to run his warm hands over her arms and sides, teasing at sensitive spots, working the soles of her feet which had gone cold in the interim, lipping and licking at the backs of her knees, kissing, biting, sucking passion marks into her neck, above her hip. It must have taken hours, but it didn’t feel like that at all. Not when he put the last of his strokes to the Dragon prowling down her back.

He stared at it a moment, wondering at the result. A galaxy, reflected in the _purple-blue-green_ black of hexagonal dragonscales, glowing eyes like coals but gold, gold like the crackling energy he’d seen running over her skin. Deliberately _not_ like lightning patterns, but ordered, if flexible; hexagonal but allowing for the curves of the beautiful body under his hands. Organic. Nothing harsh about this order. A Dragon, prowling, coiled to spring, protective of its mate.

Sly wondered then if he could call this mark a blessing, a protection against whatever else might threaten her when he would, inevitably, one day be not enough—not fast enough, not strong enough, not there when she needed him.

He wondered what it was he’d been trying to convey, to do. He watched its movement, the slight undulation as the Dragon breathed, the roll of muscles so well cared for. Perhaps he’d been trying to hide it and nothing more. To hide the old injuries that he could still sometimes see, sparking outlines of scars and wounds and death’s near misses. _And what good had that ever done?_ he wondered bitterly, feeling, suddenly, horribly ashamed.

“Sly,” he heard, and snapped out of the downward spiral, realising she’d called him more than once. Worried eyes bored into his, and the jars of paint had somehow removed themselves from where they’d been, resting on the bedside table now. “Come back,” she sing-songed, a faint smile on her lips not quite masking her distress.

“Sorry,” he said quickly, trying to compose himself again.

“No, Sly. Where did you go? Tell me?”

How to explain this, then? Large, beautiful, violet eyes staring into his, filled with all the emotions that he couldn’t bear to see, knowing he’d put them there.

“You—I—” How to tell her that the marks still danced across her skin, that ownership that she’d been so afraid of as a child? The marks of all those that had hurt her, the marks that reminded him he’d not been quick enough to protect her always.

Understanding dawned much faster than he’d ever imagined. On the heels of that, though, came an unexpected wry little smile. “You’re not the first,” she said, “to tell me that my fears still own me.” She shifted under him, and he moved, allowing her to sit up in front of him, heedless of all the hours of work that might then end up smeared across the sheets. He’d been so careful up til now, but it didn’t seem to matter, suddenly.

“It doesn’t go away, not really,” she explained softly. “It never does. A healthy dose of fear is good to have, and,” she flashed a rueful grin here, “I have much to be afraid of. Much to be afraid for,” stroking a soft thumb across his cheek. “I’ll admit, sometimes I sink in it too deep. Though,” she added, with a curious head tilt, “there aren’t many people in the world who’ve ever been able to tell me.”

“Then they weren’t looking close enough,” he all but growled, instantly regretting the stricken look on Lia’s face.

It faded back to thoughtfulness before he could apologise, and her hand covered his open, stuttering, treacherous mouth. “Well, in part you’re right,” she said slowly, a distant look in her eyes.

Sly waited, watching the gears clicking away behind her eyes, memories unfolded and refolded and shuffled aside. In there was a map that only she could read, but on her face was a story he could decipher, and whatever scars she did not bear, still she aged. He catalogued the fine lines about her eyes and mouth, the slight crease in her brow. Some of them, those worry-lines, he’d probably been responsible for. He liked to claim responsibility for the laugh lines too.

“They also didn’t know how to look,” she said finally, and shrugged. “Not the best way to grow up. But you—”

She broke off and simply stared at him for a long few moments, hands tracing over his cheeks, his eyebrows, his nose, his lips. “Somehow,” she murmured, “you’ve seen the most of me, even my best on days that I was at my worst.”

He felt himself drawn in again, inexorably, into a kiss that started slow, igniting a coiling heat deep within him. It was slow but dedicated, as Liura pulled him close and refused to let him go. When they broke apart for air, she still held on, rested her forehead against his, panting slightly. “Will you show me?” she whispered.

The state he was in, it took him a moment to realise she meant the Dragon on her back. Sly hesitated. “I don’t know if—”

“Well you certainly never made a claim to own me,” Liura laughed lightly, “and you did say that brushwork is not indelible ink. But if you wanted to _mark_ me,” her voice dropped into a low and predatory purr, “I don’t think I’d mind giving myself over to your capable hands and tender mercies.”

A haze fell over his eyes suddenly and the world blurred. He didn’t quite know how he’d managed to stand, lifting her off the bed as he went, but he found himself with his feet on the floor, arms about his neck, legs winding around and locking at his back, a crystalline laugh in his ears. His arousal, mostly ignored and left to simmer for hours as he’d worked, suddenly ignited in the flash of possessive hunger. Sly felt lightheaded.

He carried her like that into the ‘fresher, set her down on the counter on conveniently folded hand towels, much to her amusement. She felt around for a hand mirror while he ran his hands up and down her arms and sides, up to her neck, pulled her closer to nibble at the line of her collarbone. He didn’t stop until he heard an audible gasp, and looked up to see her wide, stunned eyes.

“Perfect,” she whispered. “Sly, it’s perfect.” She reached for him, pulled him close again, winding around him tight, wrapping him in that same intangible warmth, that feeling of being needed and wanted and safe, submerged in her many layers.

He started to move, to carry her back, but she stopped him. “No, here,” she whispered, slow and lazy heated desire skittering in sparks along his skin. “Right here. Can’t wait. No more waiting,” and bit down hard.

Sly cried out, but took the hint, smoothing his hand down to her hip, then in to the inner thigh.

He’d tease her, still, as long as she’d let him. He’d wait for her, until she was shaking and moaning and incoherent, sweat-soaked hair against her neck and almost in tears. After all, there was a mirror behind her, and he wanted to see that Dragon, _his mark,_ as she came apart.


End file.
